The Art of Invisible AI - Granola with Christopher Pedregal

There's like almost as much of a chance that you mess up the thing that you have than if you, that you make it better.

I think the reflex for most AI products is like automation of a workflow which necessarily requires a new behavior.

My bar to try a new product is exceptionally low. Like, it's a great joy to go and tinker and explore. And then as Nabil knows, my bar to stick with the product is exceptionally high.

But I do think you're building a fundamentally different product if you are trying to replace what someone's doing doing versus get some superpowers.

Hello, everybody. Welcome to Hallway Chat. I'm Nabil.

I'm Fraser.

Welcome back.

And today we have a special guest, we have Chris. Hey, Chris.

Hi, everyone, I'm Chris.

Chris is CEO of a company called Granola. Frequently on the short lists of AI products that you use every day for most everybody who's using them. So if you haven't used it, you should try it. And it has some pretty different product philosophies. And so we thought we'd have a little product conversation with Chris today. And from there, who knows where it's going to go before we get to product Chris, we have this topic that Frasier and I, I've had sitting on this list for Hallway Chat for a while of things you want to talk about. The periodic thing that happens every, I don't know, a couple times a month, former founder comes to you and says like, okay, I've shut that thing down. I'm now thinking about what it is I'm going to do next, the like, second time founder thing. And I, I've had that conversation I don't know how many dozens and dozens of times over the years. It feels fraught because you're gonna maybe over rotate from the last thing that maybe didn't work or maybe know too much about what you're gonna go do the next time and how hard it is. I don't think we're gonna do the full bio and how Granola happened, all the rest of that stuff. But I think if I started a new company tomorrow, it would be a really weird and hard road to have the courage to, to look at all the AI note taking apps out there in the world and then be like, you know what? The world needs.

One more, one more.

So talk a little bit. Can you just talk about what the journey was like for you?

Sure, yeah, yeah, I'm happy to talk about it. It can be useful to hear people's stories. Like my formative experience was the Last startup I did and that company was called Socratic, it was an AI tutor on your mobile phone and it was aimed at high school kids. They were if you're stuck on a homework problem, you take a photo of your homework problem and then Socratic would try to teach you how to do it. This is a previous wave of AI. We were like RAI was linear regression models. It was a very, very different type of thing. It was quite successful from a product and usage and growth standpoint. Shanz and I, we ran that company for five years and it was acquired by Google and it had something silly like when I left Google I was getting 4 billion queries a year, which is a lot for an iOS app that's, you know, primarily in the U.S. i think every founder has scar tissue from their, well, a lot of scar tissue, like scar tissue all the way down. But like you know, company specific one. And what we didn't do with Sigmatic is we really didn't, we were just one of these like, you know, we're going to get, we're going to get huge and then we'll figure out the business model later. And while that is I think sometimes a very good strategy or can make sense, for me personally, I knew in my next startup I wanted to work on a product where it was very clear who was going to pay for it and why they would pay for it. Whereas in education I think the main mistake we made is that we built a product for students, but in high school the actual person who would be paying for it is the parent. So I knew that going into this one.

How did you pick a category?

I talked to other second time founders and they were way, way, way more analytical about it and process driven. I talked to one guy and he spent a while exploring. He came up with 10 ideas and I think he spent like a month on each of them and basically saw how far he could get in a month and what the pitfalls were and then he like did a crazy analysis of what to choose. But you can over index on what you know and the, the reality is, you know, 1% when you start and the, the whole space will be defined by the 99% that you don't know and will only discover as you work on it for multiple years. So I think there's a bias of the known versus the unknown which can be very dangerous. What I did is so I like Google Bot Socratic and then I quit Google knowing I wanted to do a startup and I didn't have an idea and I didn't have a co founder and it wasn't a hard date, but I gave myself a year to explore. And I wasn't looking for a startup idea on day one. I was looking to play. I'd been at Google and been running a team. I'd been busy. I'd become a father recently and I had none of the headspace that comes from that creative exploration that has no, no specific goal at the end of it, if, if that makes sense.

Yeah, there'd been no open ended play. You're very deterministic. You've got okrs, you're at Google, you got a thing to hit.

Yeah, exactly.

You hadn't wandered.

Yeah.

So here I was like, okay, I just need to play with stuff. Because usually the real signal comes from when you're like messing around with something for a while and you can kind of build these intuitions and, and like, as luck would have it, like two weeks in, I just started playing with GPT3 and what had happened is that the instruct version had just come out and I was instantly hooked. But from like a, oh, this is different. Like most people in tech have this experience in the last like three years. At one point, right, where you're like, you play with this and you're like, oh, this is different from what came before. My mental models break, like what's possible. My intuition's about the technology are way off because it can write like a paper that's pretty impressive, but it can't be basic math, like what the hell's going on there? You know, all that stuff. And I just basically built shit for myself and to play around with projects.

Were you doing a lot of interviews at that time that that led you to something like granola? Were you taking a lot of notes? Is that part of research?

You were doing conversations with your kids?

What?

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Before we get there, what's like one of the silliest ideas that you explored and then tossed away?

I'll tell you the, like the main one. So it was like back to this like wandering in the desert thing. I was like, okay, I just quit my job, I'm living in London, I don't know that many people here. I want to do a startup. I don't have a co founder. I don't know what to work on. Like, there's probably a lot of processing, thinking, exploring, you know, and instead of getting a therapist, I was like, okay, I'm gonna journal.

You talked to ChatGPT about it?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. But like what I did Is like, okay, I'm gonna journal. And writing in a journal is kind of slow. And. And I was playing with all the lines, and I was like, man, I wonder if I could just talk to, like, could I just talk a diary or a journal? And I think there are these, like, staple ideas that everyone builds as they're like, oh, I should do. You know, I want to do an AI startup or whatever. I think this is, like, one of them. But again, I didn't do it as it started. I did. I did it for myself. I built this, like, really shitty iOS app where I would press a button, put on my AirPods, walk around London for 10 minutes talking to myself. But luckily, with these things, they don't look crazy. And then it would transcribe it, and then it would turn it into a journal entry, right? That's like the first version. And then, like, the really cool stuff was now, like, hyperlink every proper noun or name of a person. I want to see everything I said about my daughter, I want to see that on the timeline. And this is the kind of thing where it's like, it's one API call and you can be like, oh, pull up sentiment, or pull out the core ideas here. And then it was just like, you realize what you're really messing with is the structure of knowledge and information, and that thing is, like, malleable and stretchable, and that's what LLMs let you do. And so from this, like, ramble from walking around, you could end up with specific and distinct ideas. You get it. And this was all just playing around, and it was super fun. And at some point I looked up and I'm like, is this a company I want to start? And this was like, hell, no. As much as I'd like, I'd love to build this tool, and it's interesting. I just. I thought it'd be really challenging to build a business around it. I hope. I think there will be one. But at the. You know, a couple years ago, it seemed like a much harder than it would today.

I think, for what it's worth, having heard that story, you said the beginning is not that applicable. My particular story. But I actually think a lot of folks who start their first companies go in with a kind of, like, raw naivete. They were playing in college or just afterwards with some friends, and they go build the thing and then it. And even if they just made millions of dollars, they come out and they're like, oh, no, but I'm so much smarter now. I would do it differently. And they often go down the deterministic approach. And I think it's completely wrong. Like, I actually. The number of people that have done the thing that you mentioned earlier that your friend did every month, or I've had friends who did. I'm going to write an investor memo as if I was a VC before I start the thing. I'm going to write 10 of them and then I'm going to go through the process and I'm going to take a year. And I have lots of folks that have gone through that. That feels like a pretty bad way to find net new things. Unless it's a really specific kind of startup, which is you are trying to go after market arbitrage. Like you are trying to look for a seam in the world and then build some slightly better version, which is very different. It's faster horses versus disruptive thinking. We've known each other for a long time. Socratic was also a spark company. And I think of you as a founder who is like going to wander and then like actually pull a seam and see where that leads you. I can see the connection between your journaling app and granola, to be honest. We don't have to go through every moment of that to know that, oh, the thing that you did there is just listen to yourself. You got to a spot and then you didn't stop. You didn't say you weren't satisfied. You're like, okay, so this is good. Can we get better? A little bit further. Okay, this is good. Can we get better? And you just keep going.

I've actually thought about this a little while. But what's amazing is that when you're actually doing a startup, it's almost impossible to have the time to do that exploration. And oftentimes the newness, the insight, like the core insight or signals that you're going to build on, you have to be in that state to look for it. It's a hard thing to be able to do both. And I actually, I was lucky. Like, I had the luxury of a year to explore. Now that I'm, you know, busy building granola, I'm kind of like, man, I wish I had more, more time and space to like, really, like, explore and think deeply about these new things. Because I think especially in AI, because there's so much newness, like new things to invent that, that approach and that perspective is super valuable.

Well, I hope you find a way to stay open to it. I think that is the fight because it isn't just one gun that went off at GPT land as, you know, like it wasn't just a thing that happened three years ago. And so you encapsulate your worldview in amber and then go make your bet and run with it. This is one of those situations where like, it changes again and it changes again. It changes again. And. And so, yeah, I don't know how you fight for that. If you, if you figure that out, please let us know. Cause I'll. We'll tell all the founders.

Yeah, I'm just with great joy listening to that story. I love those stories. I could listen to those types of stories all day long. The idea that you had given yourself a year is part of it. But then the idea that you were both disciplined enough to build and experiment and explore and then malleable enough to sit with it in like this philosophical, what is this?

What do I have?

You can see like the dots connect, right. To what you're doing with granola. But like, if you had set up, okay, we're going to run this experiment for one month and then move on. I can't imagine you end up in that wine space.

Yeah. So I think like, product's tough, right? It's like the left brain, right brain, you kind of have to, you have to do it all, which is difficult. And I think an important part of the story is that once I met my co founder, Sam, and we decided we were going to prototype stuff together, we kind of took insights that he had and insights that I had. We fleshed out different directions or ideas and then we showed it to like 30 people. And I think that is the other side of the equation, which is super important. So I think it's like you need to build your intuition. Like, you know, what do I know? This is from my limited life experience. Right. But you build an intuition of like what you, what you want in the world, what you would use, like what you think is important. And that needs to be like, pretty deeply felt. And then it's really, really important to put that in front of a lot of people and look at it from their perspective. And out of the, I don't know, a bunch of ideas we showed to folks, like, and people's eyes glazed over on all of them except for the granola one, you know, and it wasn't exactly what granola is today, but it was the same idea. And then Sam and I were like, ah, I chance for making another note taking app. You know, like, that was the, that was the ethos going, going into it. You're like, all right, because like, literally Their eyes sparkled and I was like, okay, this is the one. So I think it's. You could get lost in here.

Well, there's a product philosophy to this product that it's strange to me we don't see more often. Every other note taking app does exactly what you expect it would do, at least historically. I'm sure they're all copy you very quickly and we'll get to there. But they do the thing you would expect, which is like almost the same as your journaling app. They take your rambling conversation and then they spit back out this table of contents summary, which is never quite good enough. It's okay. But you remarkably never find yourself ever reading those generic meeting notes again. It's just done. What you do is different. We've been hemming and hawing for a little bit about what do you call the way that you built this product? What is the. What is the Malcolm Gladwell version of explaining this product philosophy? Because it looks like a notepad. It's a product philosophy rooted in invisibility and flow.

I think what's confusing about Granola is that today what granola does is that it helps you take notes in meetings and therefore it looks like all the other AI meeting bots or apps out there. That's not really how we think about granola. We all kind of look like the same thing, but I think we have very different trajectories. The thinking behind granola is at its core is like a tool for you to do your thinking, to do more. Right. And that might seem like semantic, but I think there's like a fundamental difference in terms of like what we're going. And so my co founder, Sam, he came from the note taking Tool for Thought World as well, and he had a doctor thought on this. And I think when you set out to build a tool that at its essence is really, we want to be like the next version of paper and pencil, like the. There's a bicycle for your mind. It's like the motorcycle for your mind. Meetings are a very convenient place to start because first of all, transcription and meetings, it's a killer feature of LLMs that they can take a rambling transcript and make something useful out of it. It's an easy moment to build a habit around because these meetings are scheduled. We can send notifications. Building habits really, really hard and end product. But that's not the end all, be all. We might focus on meetings for a while because there's a lot we can still do to make it better. But we really want to be this place where help you do better work, get better thinking.

You first started by calling it something that feels similar to any of the other AI note taking apps. And I would say the thing that I love about it is that it's not. You held up a pen and a paper and I was going to say it feels far more akin to pen and paper or Apple Notes in the sense that it's familiar and it doesn't try to over promise on the technology side. And I think that there's an awful lot of discipline and product craft that has to go into getting it to that point is all of the complexity is hidden away from the end user.

Yeah. If you take this core belief that hey, we want to be a tool like pen and paper that is just, just works that people can grab, that doesn't get in the way, that makes them better and you really think about what it takes to do that. I think you can map back a lot of the perhaps kind of weird or unexpected product decisions that we made. Like the fact that it's a Mac app, I think that was like something very different. Like it's an app that's on your computer and like the thinking there is like it needs to be really easy to grab. Right. Like it needs to be as easy to grab as your notepad and it needs to like if it's in a tab in your browser, it gets lost. Like this is literally something that happens. Like you try to take notes in the browser tab and people have too many tabs open, you'll never find it again. Or you need to be able to use it for any meeting you have. Like if you have to think about, oh, this is a zoom meeting, it's going to work. It's not going to work on a Google Meet meeting or a hangout or you know what, like this in person meeting. Like there are all these like kind of requirements when you have that lens of like what's it take to be this like on the present pool that I think like granola makes a lot of sense there. But if you look at it compared to why'd you build a Mac app that only a tiny percentage of the world can use? You know what I mean? And like when we started it, only people on Mac OS 13 could even use it because before that you couldn't get system audio. So it's like a tiny like little sliver of humanity and we're like, it seems like a dumb idea, but it'll work out.

Something about the way you just phrased that like Trigger the reflex for most AI products is automation of a workflow which necessarily requires a new behavior. So you can imagine the kind of canonical, oh, I want to make something a little bit faster. And so I've got a bunch of if then statements popping up in LLM and doing a thing. And I want to automate that. And it's a very engineering mindset and I need you to engage in a new behavior. You're going to now read table of contents transcripts after you finish a meeting. That's your new behavior. Because we just ran this workflow and I think in a way what, what philosophically you're talking about is like instead of automation of a workflow which requires new behavior, it's augmentation of a current workflow which you stay in flow about. And so it's the same behavior but better. Right? It is the equivalent in code gen for AI of Devin, which is going to go off and do a whole bunch of things, but I feel like I have a distinct loss of control. And maybe we'll see if it'll work out or won't work out when it's done, but I have to go and evaluate it afterwards. That's the kind of automation of a workflow. And you're like, no, we're closer to GitHub Copilot. You're going to code the way you're going to code, you're going to do the thing, you're going to be in flow and we're just going to help you do it.

Yeah, absolutely. I think there's like, I mean, there's a spectrum, but I feel like there's almost like a philosophical stance you need to take when you're building an AI, which is are you trying to do the stuff for the person? Are you trying to outsource it to the AI, or are you trying to like give the person superpowers to do it better? And I went to this talk by David Holt, the founder of Mid Journey, and he went down this rabbit hole where he got really obsessed with the like AI versus ia, like back in Marvin Minsky and Engelbart times. And it was kind of like, oh, no, like the future computing, like artificial intelligence, computers are going to do everything. And then you had like Engelbart being like, no, no, no, no, like we built these tools and so that humans can do a hundred x what they could do before, solve problems they could never solve before. And I think in some ways that's kind of silly today because it's like, I want AI to help me to augment my intelligence. But I do think you're building a fundamentally different product. If you are trying to replace what someone's doing versus give some superpowers and granola's a hundred percent in that category.

The promise is you jot down what you think is important, and then you have this little buddy sitting in the meeting over your shoulder who then fills in all the rest when it's needed. I don't think you deliver that product. If you think of the world through that first lens, like if you're trying to automate, you end up with a very bad experience. I feel like that that promise is super high, but exceptionally hard to deliver. And at the end of the day, I don't think most humans want that.

Right.

Like, we have a lot of insight bouncing around our heads and like, we capture that in little snippets. And the idea that an AI is going to totally automate, like, the insight that you want to capture in that moment feels like a fallacy.

Yeah, I think it's super easy. If you look at the world and there are all these meetings, what's the output of the meeting? It's this text document. These are notes. Right. Okay. My job is to capture data, record the meeting, and then generate this text. If you look at the world that way, then you build a certain type of product. And I think you're totally like, what humans do in the world is like so much more complex than you realize until you actually really dig down and think about it and like, until you're.

Trying to describe to an LLM what they're doing.

Yeah, exactly.

Which is what you have to do.

Yeah. You're basically like, no, that's interesting.

So, so that, that reminds me, you wrote this blog post on every. Which is an awesome publication. And one of the, like, your big insights was that you can't write a rigid set of instructions to get these things to work. You have to treat the AI like a smart intern and give them context. Maybe you want to elaborate on that. I thought that was really interesting way to think about it.

I think it basically comes down to this idea that the world is really, really complex. So if you have a world that's very complex and you could be put into a meeting of any arbitrary kind of situation, and you need this product to write good notes. It's almost like you have to imbue it, like the values and goals that you have in your life, I think that's like the ultimate end state. You know what I mean? Here's What I'm trying to achieve in my life and here's what I'm trying to achieve in my job and here's what I'm trying to achieve in this meeting with these people, these relationships. And it's completely impossible to list a bunch of instructions. If this is true then, and this is true, then do this because those instructions will 100% conflict. So be concise, but also remove all personal information or chit chat or banter from the meeting. Except if it's like rel, you know what I mean? There's no way to write those things. Whereas I think the models are now smart enough that if you can try to give them context as you would an employee, then much, much, much more likely to talk about the stuff that you care about. But yeah, it's funny, it's like, it's definitely, it's easy to say. It took us a while to get there. And the prompts are completely different. Like they're much shorter and they're much shorter. And they're also much more specific to you, right? To try to understand like what goals you may have in that interaction.

Would you ever expose those kinds of prompts or that kind of control up to the user? Because there's a conflict there between the thing that just works and feels right with you know, as you use any system, you ride the curve. It's two years later you can be an expert at this system. Right? The first time I ever use a diffusion model and want to make a sign in ChatGPT, I want before, before it passes off the dall e. I want ChatGPT to augment that my prompt like crazy and try and make it make sense so that the thing that comes back is kind of good. If I'm 10,000 images in a mid journey, I don't want you to change a single letter because I have now built some sense of nuance of what I want and I know how to express it in a way that I wouldn't have a year earlier. Is that true here? Do you think you'd ever put this into expert mode?

So yes, we would. But like my philosophy is like the most important thing is that it just works out of the box for people. They don't have to think about it. Right? And so I think that's like a non negotiable. We have to do that. I think once it works out of the box and people are like, oh hey, this is pretty good now I want to make it amazing for me in these specific instances, we definitely want to let People do that. We haven't figured out how to do that. And I think the thing that scares me there, you guys probably have big thoughts on this, is it seems really easy to shoot yourself in the foot as a user. Right. And. Or to end up in like, in a dead end kind of situation. Like, a good example here is system prompts on GPT, right? Yep. I went in there, I wrote a system prompt. It made stuff better. Four months go by, I look at it, it's no longer correct. You know what I mean? It's like, it's like out of date. I never would have noticed it. Like, I think you have to be pretty smart about how these are, like, living, breathing, evolving systems. Also, we want to be able to change the underlying model. That's the other thing. Right. Which might break if we let the user, like, have a whole lot of control. Like, the middleware, definitely something we want to do. It's just. It's something. I think we haven't figured out exactly the right way to do it.

Nabil and I have strong opinions, as you insinuated on this, and I feel like we're usually like polar opposites. I put this in the bucket of what you just said where it's like, my thought is that it's something you want to get to, but it's five years away, and I hope it always stays five years away from you. I understand why system prompts are a thing. I've never, never changed mine. I can only imagine how elaborate Nabeel's is. I think that the best technology products that I've used feel invisible. I think most people don't even consider that when you turn on a faucet, all of the complexity that's like, literally buried in your wall and underneath the road to get clean water to flow into your sink. And there's a reason why. There's a whole bunch of reasons. But, like, that our taps are so simple and that we know, like, let's just turn them on and get the water flowing. The thing that I love about your product is the. That you have such an opinionated point of view where it does feel it like you've made decisions for the end user to make it as simple as possible. And for the most part, it just works. And I'll tell you, Chris, like, I have the utmost respect for you. And then every now and then, I stumble onto that little overlay where it says, like, here's your custom templates. And I'm like, oh, no, Chris, just.

Get rid of that. It's Atrocious.

Why is it there? Why?

Why? Well, I want more custom templates. Frasier, what are you talking about?

So the model we're pursuing, who knows if it'll work out, is basically minimal ui, try to keep as little visible to the user by default, but if you go digging, kind of like as much control or complexity as you want, and I think you kind of need both. What was interesting is like we built the first version of gridola. I spent a year with people using it, right, Getting feedback and after a while the feedback was like, oh, the notes are all right. But really I wish I could structure it. Like I wish I had templates, I wish I could structure it whatnot. So we built the first version of templates, which is basically in the app. And what happened is people didn't really use but like, like it's more work. And not saying like the templates aren't great, you're going to, we can make them better, people use them more, but the vast majority of people didn't use them. And then we're like, oh, actually what we should do is we should, now that we have these templates of what we think are really good notes for all these different scenarios, we should try to deliver those notes automatically for you in all those different meetings. Right? And then what we did is we basically spend all that time and energy trying to get the out of the box notes to be, you know, closer to if you had chosen the perfect template and whatnot.

That's a case where I completely am in agreement with Nabil, where his like, his advice that I've heard him say a number of times is like, do not listen to your most active power users in the earliest stages and deliver what they want.

This is why I don't listen to Nabil. Yeah.

I think there's at least three things that you just like embedded in all of that that it's worth. Paul, now for a second, Chris. So the first of all is, you know, the first time we met talking about this company was a different product, even though it was an AI note taking product. And, and you didn't mention earlier but like Socratic was a smart company. I met you a long time ago and a lot of this thing, the habit, the kind of rhythm of what you're saying, if people don't pick it up, I like that I pick up is how does this get to the. I think it's close to the last line of the essay that you wrote in every. Which is just like, how does this product make me feel when I use it and having the kind of like empathy to try and like pierce through whatever customer feedback you're getting or whatever they're saying and trying to listen to what they're saying about how they feel versus all the other nouns they happen to be using when they're talking about it and then not being satisfied. Those are the two traits I kind of assign to you in the way that you navigate product in this particular situation. The thing that you need to have in order to become an expert in order to open up the templates tab and type in your own prompts and you're like, I'm a person. Before granola, I was using a product called Superpowered, which was great. And one of the things I loved about it is that it gave you prompt control. And so I had spent months refining down different prompts for the four or five different types of meetings that I had and getting them right to what I wanted and so and so forth. And by the way, then readdressing them a month later and changing them again. Fraser, because these are fluid things that change all the time and all the rest of that stuff, that is not the way most people are going to behave. But the thing that's true is anything that you do a million times, you start to build a nuance sense of it. So the first time you do something, you just want a job done. But the act of becoming an expert in anything is basically four things. You need to be in a valid environment in other regions. You need to understand the rules and repeat it. It needs to be an ordered environment, it needs to be a timely piece of feedback. And then you need to have deliberate practice doing that thing that's kind of like a nature of what makes any game you play regularly and you get better at, you become an expert. It's valid, it's ordered, it's timely and it's deliberate practice against that thing. And I actually think that meetings fit almost all those categories. It's a thing you do regularly. You're going to look back at that feedback afterward. The notes you took when, if you use the notes ideally and you want it to be better and when you better. And that's going to, I think when you get to year two or year three of somebody actively using granola, it's going to give people a really fine grained sense of where you're messing up or not. That eventually the like little prickly bits of granola that aren't quite right for my particular use case are going to crop up. And it's just about user control at that moment for the like 15% of people who care because it's the 15% of people that then augment that stuff. Like Fraser, I get it, you're not going to do it. The whole deal is like at Spark, I'm going to be the guy that goes, does that and then, and then I just need the power to go hand that back to Fraser and be like, yeah, I did all the work, I prepped all the stuff. Like, here's your new Spark templates.

What I want to do, I actually think notes, I think like notes are fine. I think notes are going to be less and less important as like a format in the future. What I would like to give, what I'd like to build into one. I want to build a million things, but it's something I think would be cool, would be like a artifact generating. You know how there's the chat on the right hand side and you can kind of chat with a meeting or whatever. It's like, you know, like a client style. Okay, write a follow up email for this or generate an investment memo, whatever, whatever it is, whatever the next step is. And there I would like to let Nabil write a super, super, super, like detailed, maybe multi step prompt or workflow and then share that, that's, you know, with, with Spark. So you could basically be like, here's the, here's the like Spark secret sauce, you know, whatever, like analysis, a company analysis, like, whatever. Because I think there's something pretty cool there because if you, if you can, who's willing to put in the work and the other folks can benefit from it and then there's like a social accountability. So that way the thing doesn't like wither and die. If people are actually using it, they're like actively investing in it.

I'm such a fan. Like you're here because you have a note taking app and you said, yeah, note taking isn't really the thing. Here's what I want to do. And that's my rebuttal to you, Nabil, when I was making the face is I don't think you want to cater to the 15% power user on note taking. I think that's a dwindling, small, uninteresting place to be. Be sorry, but there, like, if you own the place where we're capturing our, I don't know, like pen and paper in a world where this technology of like artificial intelligence and everything else exists, I think there's like so much that you do with that and the, the, the breadth and the depth of that value has got to be much larger.

I don't disagree with that. It's just a horizontal product. Right. And, and it's just not a vertical product. Like, and not every startup is a horizontal product. And in a horizontal product world, the question is like, will the LLM know better about how I take notes in my accounting practice in Bangladesh, or will Chris figure that out? Or is there an intermediary? If somebody has been using and loving granola, where one of those accountants in Bangladesh becomes an expert and you see it in lots of horizontal products, they need to be easy enough and simple enough to get started. And then you have this layer of experts that kind of like emerge bottom up. Like, you know, like the economy of people making weird notion templates that you download. And that doesn't mean you make notion for the people that make notion templates. That would be the wrong thing. But it's part of a viable, important, healthy ecosystem.

I, I get it. And Chris's word was atrocious when he was talking about the templates. I actually think it's thoughtful how you've integrated them and like they, they do give Nabil the power and I don't have to deal like, it's just like out of sight, out of mind for me. And he's, he's able to like, get it to the point where he wants. And that's probably the right split is I don't ever come across it and then Nabil has it for when he needs it.

Yeah, we just want more AI products to do that. Can you talk to all of them, Chris? Can you talk to others?

I mean, I don't know if it's a winning strategy. I mean, like, we'll see, we'll see how it all plays out. I, I do think the people like granola, like it a lot. I think, I think that, that, you know, people say you have taste and.

You'Ve made then a lot of like, opinionated decisions, which is like the combination of those two things generally works out pretty well. One big decision that you've made is you don't show the transcript. Which the first couple of times that I used the product I thought was, Was weird. Was weird. Weird is maybe you can't see it.

You know, you can see it, right. Like most people, a lot of people don't discover this. Like you can click on the little dancing bars and then you can look at the transcript like real time during the meeting. That's.

Yeah. Can you see it post fact, though?

You can see it post it's also, it's just hidden away. Like I think the reality is like transcripts are really long and unwieldy and like just a pretty crappy format for digesting information. So it's there, it's hidden away on purpose. But what people do want to do sometimes is like they go back and they're like oh damn, wait, really? Like that's, they said that like what was this point? And like at that point you want to be able to like zoom in and be like did the transcription mess up? You know and like completely misinterpret what was said or like is the LLM messing up or is like oh okay, is this like, is this real? Or what was the context around that? I think it's super important to be able to do that. But like full on transcripts, not super useful.

I have a question on process as I've listened to you on this call. So you have clearly this big vision, right? You're like, oh no, the note, forget the note taking thing. This is just the act one to get us over here. You have all sorts of short term requests probably flowing in from end users. How are you prioritizing where you're spending your time and what's getting done, what will get shipped in the next three months versus what's pushed out for a year from now?

Oh man, it's, it's tough. Like it's funny. I, I, when we built the first version of Granola, there's basically no post meeting anything in Granola, right? It just generates the notes and there's the chat. So you can use the chat to like generate action and if you want, it's not, it's not great yet, but there's nothing really useful post meeting. And I was like, okay, we're going to launch that and then we're, we're going to get to the post meeting stuff like right away. And it's been I don't know how many months since we've launched and we have touch that just because there's like so much to just to do on the basics and make it really good. I think it's tough. I'm curious what y' all think. On one hand what we have the people who like it, really like it, it's growing, you know, it hits a nerve. On the other hand, we're in the advent of like latest generation of AI means all this new stuff is now possible and it's going to happen and it's going to happen quickly, right? And like Granola is like the 3% of what I hope it will be, you know, not that long from now. And I think, I don't know, I feel like traditional product wisdom would be like you have, you have product market fit, like just, just do that, don't mess it. You know, like you try to build more product, there's like almost as much of a chance that you mess up the thing that you have than if you, that you make it better, you know, like, like more features oftentimes not going to make it better. But in this space, man, like, I don't know, people ask me about competition and like who I worry about, like I worry about a startup launching tomorrow more than I worry about the big companies personally. Because I think you like the stuff's evolving so quickly and I think like AI native products built on like these new building blocks will like look and feel very different. So I think it's tough in terms of what we prioritize. When we launched we had four people on the team, which was like not enough given what happened post launch in terms of the growth. So I think the first six months after launch we're digging ourselves out of product engine company debt in terms of just being super understaffed for the volume of what was happening. And now I think we're going to try to split it kind of 50, 50, right. Like we have a lot of companies coming to us being like, hey, we have a bunch of folks using granola like we'd like to the whole company use it or you know, and there's a lot we need to do there to just kind of like mature and become more, more sophisticated at the same time. I feel like the product we have today, if it doesn't evolve quickly, it'll feel outdated and obsolete, like I don't know, in 12 months. Like I think both of those things are true.

If you were starting granola from scratch right now, given just internalize for a second everything that's going on, what would you do differently? What would it look like if you were trying to kill you?

It's a great question. I feel like I should force my. We should ask ourselves this question every month. Okay, here's my answer. Okay. What are the big things that have changed, I'd say since we launched Grimit 1, right. I see two directions. One is models have just gotten way, way, way smarter if you're looking at like a one level intelligence. And the second one is multimodal. At first it's like images, but you can imagine like real streaming, real time video and audio into the model. Right. The multimodal one is interesting. I thought it would have a bigger impact or change or like you could stream the entire meeting into an LLM and we haven't done that yet. And I think there's probably a product to be done there. It is interesting though because at the end of the day, like a, like a text editor as the interface between the human and the AI is a very familiar, very powerful kind of like high precision interface. So like, I think that even though I think multimodal is coming, things might still look like text editors for, for a very long time. I think if I were trying to kill us, I would maybe try to leapfrog the, the notes part a little bit. Like notes are important, but basically it's like, what's the post meeting, post notes, artifact stuff? And I would, I would maybe focus on that. Like, why did you have the meeting? Right? What was the point of the meeting? What's the outcomes that you want? And just try to do that really, really well because I don't think anyone's doing that. I think there's a lot of unexplored, really powerful stuff to figure out there. The approach we took is like, we have to get your trust to get in the meeting, right? Like we need to be useful off the get go so that then we can do XYZ with all this context and like make your life easier not to do this work. But maybe there's an alternate. Maybe you can just leapfrog that. I don't know.

Frazier, what else has changed? What are the kind of like tools in the tool chest we maybe didn't have a couple years ago? And also a little bit looking forward if you're planning or planning for the next year.

Where my mind went as a user of granola wasn't toward like the technology that may be coming. It was more around how I use it and where I use it, and also where I don't use it. There's a big part of my life where I'm still turning to the pad and the paper and the pen and it almost feels like you show up and you're like, nope, you can't use it right now. Sorry. Put down the pad and paper and the pen with this tool and go, go use Nabil. Cover your ears. Go use Apple Notes. Because like, this isn't a meeting and you need to like, this is a product for meetings and we've optimized for meetings. And any other time that you want the paper and pen metaphor, I'm, I'm there To tell you.

No, I like that it's. If it's a tool for thought, then what are the other places you're thinking?

That's it. That's it. Like, I still have. It seems weird that to prepare for this call, I have an Apple Note document. What a weird word. Open. Filled with my ramblings to show up with. And that's a bifurcation of a use case that I feel like you want to own.

You can ask a totally different question, please. Yeah, it's tough. It's a tough space to like, look like five years from now and be like, you know what, what, who are the winners going to be? What are their characteristics? And like, I guess like the, a question that we got a lot. We still get. We've always gotten less now for some reason, but we got a lot earlier. And I, I still think about is what do you think is going to in the future? Like, what do you think is going to be owned by a general assistant versus a specific solution, a vertical, like AI powered tool. Does ChatGPT or Claude, do they. You have one, you know, for your whole life, your personal life, for your work life. Do you have 50? Is that even the wrong mental model? Like, what, where's that headed?

Well, Nabil's been on this journey with me over the past couple of months where I came back and I told him that even I was guilty of underestimating how broad in general the general products were going to be. And you know, where we came out in past conversations was like, things where there's high utility but low frequency of use. These broad horizontal layers are awesome. I can send it my health information the once a year or every other like, you know, quarter when I have it. And it's just fine. It's just fine. And so then the question is like, I think there's going to be a very small number of them. I think it would be weird if I have one for both my work life and my home life. That seems strange. I don't want the skivvy people in privacy and security at work to know my personal assistant information. I think that we've seen enough history that people want to separate those worlds. Then where do we go? Like, Nabeel and I landed on the idea that if there's broadness in work, then you could see a horizontal work assistant carve out some space.

I think we've probably had at least three to four hours of the last year of us on this, on, on this podcast, Chris having some version of that conversation. I think Literally, maybe our second episode was like, how do you not get hit by the tidal wave of ChatGPT? Like, where's safe ground where you. How do you build on the S curve of AI? It's probably a very frequent theme. It probably will be itching to listen back to the way we're talking about it now in two years, frankly. And in many ways we're probably quite naive about it and how we'll talk about it. I tend to try and pick these as axises and so I think frequency is an axis that Fraser just brought up that I think is worth thinking about. Who wins is going to be on this graph. If I only do it once a year, then yeah, I probably use a generalized tool. The more I move towards every day, the more I'm likely to use a specialized tool. That's obvious, that's clear. I think the other one is that framework I've been trying to think through lately is, you know, both you and me, Chris, as founders like started in that the Web 2.0 era ish stuff and the wisdom of crowds era. And I think a lot of what this is distilling down to, if we just get rid of AI or all these other things, that this latest instantiation is really like the wisdom of experts era. We are taking PhD level knowledge about a thing, encapsulating it in a model, and then letting you as a consumer access it. That's kind of what's happening. So why is CodeGen good? CodeGen is good in Claude. Not because we took all of the cat poems on the Internet and we ingested it into an LLM and made it smart. It's because we actually took really well written code and we ingested that in the LLM. We took experts in that expertise and we are now trying to distribute that expertise to everybody. It's not always at a PhD level. It's not writing at a PhD level yet. But you can imagine that this is what the large LLM companies are doing now. They're paying PhDs by the hour to like fill out math equations and put them into the LLM over and over and over again, again to try and build that expertise. And so I think the other access here is, is the thing that you are doing every day. If we take the frequency graph, is there somebody else in the world who's incredibly good at doing that better than you? And is that pattern of behavior instantiable in the model? And if so, then it will probably bleed itself into some type of user interface for some way for you to use it, that's the other axis I think about. And I, I don't know what that means for where the way granola, like, navigates itself, but I think it's true in every category. There is probably somebody who is better, who has the same thoughts as me, but is coming out of a meeting, but has a 10 times better efficacy at, like, recording the nugget of the idea that they just came up with then, like, as a habit, taking, as you get back to earlier, taking action on that idea and executing on it and making it happen. And what does that mean for who I should spe to or how I should come back to it, or what rabbit hole of research I should go down to? Like, all that stuff and that, like, capturing that wisdom of an expert and trying to make the model nudge me to be just a little bit better in that direction. That's going to feel like the superpower.

I've been listening to Nabil and I have a slightly refined take on what I shared earlier. And that is, I feel pretty confident that there will always be a space for you adjacent to those broad assistants, Claude and chatgpt. And here's reason why. I think maybe last time Nabil and I made a recording, Nabil laid out the framework that there's some products where, if you look back over the technology arc, new versions have arrived, like IRC became slack and discord. And there's a whole bunch of products that have that arc.

They're durable.

Like your interface goes back to rock on wall, you know, right? Of people scribbling stuff. You held up a pen and a paper. I think the fundamental interaction of taking notes is dramatically different from the fundamental interaction with a chat assistant.

Right?

And then I also think that there's always going to be a place for somebody to take what's here or here in this conversation and bring it into a world that persists.

Related, but also unrelated. Where are we going to end up with wearables? AI. AI Pen.

Wait a second, wait a second, wait a second, wait a second. You asked us the great question and, and you, you told us that you've been thinking about that for months because you've been asked and now you get asked about it less and less. But you must have a great thought. So what's your opinion?

I think that you move the time horizon too far down the line. It's like, who the hell knows, right? We might, we might be like, fighting with, like, what's it like? Sticks and rocks. Like the next word we thought by sticks and rocks. Like it's hard to imagine what that looks like, but I think for the foreseeable, maybe a different axis is there's this idea of a power tool, right? Like a tool for an expert in an expert situation. There's imovie, but there's always maybe like Final Cut or Avid or whatever there was before. And this idea of like if it is important in your job that you are extremely, extremely good and efficient at some task, then your tooling will pop up to support that. And I think that there's an access there where the best XYZ people in the world at something will use specialized tools. And I think there's a, for us there's a question of like our meetings or knowledge work like one of those, or is it like in a generic. In like the more general category. I think there's enough, at least for the next couple of years specific to the workflows around meetings. The biggest thing you don't realize about meetings is like people are back to back, they overrun, which means that they have zero time to do anything with the notes or anything between meetings. And that the hyper efficiency of getting from one context to the next context is actually incredibly important. Right? Like dumb things like opening the right zoom on the right place on your screen and having a place where immediately you can just start like chatting or whatever like those things. Or like I should be able to take my headphones off halfway through and switch to a different like oh, the zoom link didn't work, so I'm going to go to a different zoom. There are all these things that happen in like the real world that if you don't, if you haven't been building this space for the last like two years, you wouldn't necessarily appreciate. But like all these paper cuts get in the way. And I think there's enough about that that specialization really matters. Again in the short term. Like if you, if you zoom out, people are like, you know, UI is not even going to exist. It's all dynamically generated in the fly. Like maybe. I don't know. I think that's kind of far fetched personally because it's. But I think also like as a human, there's something nice about predictability and knowing that this button is going to be here and not, you know, like a redesign on the fly for me. So I think again for a little while, the specificity of the use case and all the like thorns around that or paper cuts or whatever, you might get nicked, there's a lot of value there for sure.

There's no way the UI goes away. We're like, we're in the Ms. DOS era of AI and there's a reason. Yeah. All of the proponents of the UI list world have never tried to design an interface for somebody to explain to them. Sometimes you need to know what the two options that are available are. Like, I'm going to speak to my speaker. Try. Try figuring out the available apps on your Alexa without using your phone. Like, it's insane. The reason you want to read a menu at a restaurant instead of having the restaurant read a menu to you and listen for the next 15 minutes.

The thing that's less clear to me is like, so right now, Granola is very much like one meeting at a time. That's how you interact with it. And we want to make it feel so much more like you interact with a set of meetings down the line. You. You jump into a meeting, you'd like Granola to prep you, like, the best. Like chief of Staff in the world would. Right? You get like a dossier, like, here's how you're going to be really, here's what you need to know and here's what's really important in this meeting. And you can see how, like, oh, man, if it. If it doesn't have my emails, like, it's going to miss out. Like, there's something really important in that email right before this meeting. I need to know. And then you're like, okay, well, so Granola should have access to my email. What else should I have access to? And then you're like, okay, am I granting Granola access to, like, my Slack and my email and, like, all these different services? And am I doing that for all these different slightly vertical AI agents? That's the part where it's like, is that getting replicated over and over or not? Or, like, do we have to win? Like, do we have to be the one, like, knowledge Work Core, like AI assistant? Or can there be five, five? And that's actually preferable and better for the user. Like, that's the stuff that's less. Less clear to me.

My bar to try a new product is exceptionally low. Like, it's a great joy to go and tinker and explore. And then, as Nabil knows, my bar to stick with the product is exceptionally high. Maybe like, the trite way of answering your question is like, the idea that I use ChatGPT and Claude all day, every day and I use Granola all day, every day is the starkest evidence for me that there needs to be two different products Here. Yeah, like, I just, I would have no patience for it. Like, I'm not looking to add complexity to my life just to have like new products come into it.

I was reflecting on, Chris, your earlier comment about what is different about the world of AI and what's going to change over time. The other one is at what point of context the really good chief of staff is assertive and kind of knows your weaknesses and they're not just giving you an information dump. They have judgment. And so I think when do you cross over from utility to something that has. Judgment is also a thing that I think AI products have taken a stab at a couple of times, often in like the family therapy kind of situations and so forth. And there's constrained areas, you see a little bits of it. But I would suspect with enough context you should be saying you're about to go into a meeting. By the way, you tend to ramble on when you talk about the subject. Like, keep it short, dude. There's that measure of. I like, I fed in. My father's been working on a manuscript for a while and I fed in that manuscript to Gemini and to chatgpt and I asked the normal sets of questions about, like, give me feedback on the whole thing and you know, it's fine, it's okay. I fed it into Claude. And then inside of that artifact, I fed in the authors that he really likes and enjoys versus just saying, you know, the right, like Paul Graham stuff. Like, I actually fed in some manuscripts from authors that he really enjoys and then had it give him real feedback. And man, if it wasn't like, incredible. And that's a mixture of the context setting of other writings. It's also the mixture of just Claude being better at this kind of stuff. But like, it was really, really good. And it was a moment over Christmas break that I was like, why haven't more people realized that this is actually doable today in a way that it was. It still can't write amazingly well, but it can pass judgment pretty well if with the right context. And it doesn't do that in many products.

There was an example on Twitter where Sam Altman released a statement and like underneath someone had asked him, like, provide a critique from a PR perspective and break down the statement into Claude. And it was pretty eye opening. It felt like you were talking to like a. You could being in a PR war room and the tactics they might be using and breaking it down, which, you know, I'm not from that world. So at least for me, I'm like, oh, wow. Here are these methodologies I hadn't heard of that may or may not have been used, but look like they were applied in this statement.

Yeah, like, at some point, I want granola. It's going to know my patterns of speech over the course of years. What are the things I'm talking about now that I wasn't talking about two years ago? What questions should I ask going into this meeting that I wouldn't think about? That prep can be deep and nuanced and intimate in a way that I think is almost impossible if you don't have the context that you're getting. You're right. And maybe you need emails and Slack and everything else as well, but that feels like a magical next step I'm looking forward to.

Yeah.

Earlier I said that, you know, that's a feature that is five years out, and I hope it always remains five years out. That's a feature that's like a year out, and I hope you ship it in a year, because that would be awesome. That is not the one for tomorrow, but that would be so great.

You had a question about wearables you wanted to ask. Did you want to jump into that?

Yeah. Where are we going? I feel like every couple weeks there's a new AI wearable. And, like, part of that feels like it's on some degree inevitable, but also, like, even for someone at the forefront, I feel like a lot of this stuff still feels kind of dystopian today. And, like, you know, I keep questioning myself, am I getting old? Or is it like, oh, it's not quite the time or the form factor, whatever, you know, saying, I'm curious where you. Where you land. Because, I mean, your jobs are basically to predict the future, right? And, like, the timescale of that. Of that future.

No, no, no.

Our job is to meet people who are predicting the future and then just try to adjudicate on. On whether or not which ones are.

Yeah, okay.

Yeah.

Which ones? Like, which side of crazy are they on?

Our job is to listen. I mean, I know we're talking a lot on this podcast, so we're all just sharing because I. I think of this as an active conversation more than a pontification. That's what I hope us chatting here is. It's also just an excuse to hang out with Frasier and other good people like you. I have this wearable.

Oh, which one's that?

This is Plaude P L A U D. I have this wearable. This is also.

Also plaid plod.

This is their other. This is Their non pendant version. And if I walked around the corner and spent a minute, I could just drag out another six or seven other wearable devices. It seems utterly inevitable. I think there's a really simple question of input and output modality. There's a really simple question of battery life will drive it. I don't want phone on all the time because if we get over the privacy concerns, all stress stuff like I worry about my phone battery like and like if I want this thing to listen to everything that's going on in my life so it has more context then I need to for the very simple world of battery, I do expect it to be a different product. So yeah, I, I'm very bullish on, on wearables. I think the value back has not really been delivered. So the reason you feel iffy is that you haven't really gotten real value out of using one of these yet. And if you do, then I think you're on the other side of it. If there's a job to be done and it's doing the job, then you're happy. I had a really interesting, fun, long conversation with my son a month ago about like what he wants to do in the world and the things he has. And I happened to have the plod on my jacket and we were, you know, there was no taking notes, there was no pulling out my phone. Being able to tap this really quickly and record that. I would love to have that conversation in 10 years. Right. What a wonderful and amazing artifact that will feel like photography. Right. To me. That just ages well over time and gains value over time versus losing value over time. I don't know.

I mean, I'm not adding anything to that beautiful soliloquy. That's it. That's it. The capture piece is going to be like photographs. That's a great framing. There will be cherished things. Just like we use photos today. Like we use it to communicate. We use it to capture and remember. We use it for nostalgia.

Like that.

Yeah.

We also use it to take a picture of the parking sign for utility.

I guess if you, if you use the photograph. I mean apples and oranges. But like I don't disagree with anything you said. I also don't have a clear, a very specific vision of how this is going to go down. So this is like more of the, in the sense of exploration and discussion. When Snap launched and your photos disappeared, that was a hard thing for people to wrap their head around as being a positive and it absolutely changed the way people interacted with it. And what they shared and how they felt. And I think there's something similar here or there's. There's some parallel, there's some point that we should bear in mind and maybe we normalize to it. Maybe yours, you and your son have the exact same conversation. If you know, you're Mike 247 and you know, but maybe not the human organism and society like reacts like, you know, it's like an antibodies to certain things.

But I think what you just described is like with the. The importance of, of great product and taste, right? We adapted, but snap, like unearthed something beautiful. It doesn't mean that all of the other ways with which we've used cameras have disappeared. It also doesn't mean that we like totally have changed our behavior. We've moved and we've lurched forward in lockstep and the technology's adapted, we've adapted. The products have been crafted to meet us there. I think the same thing's going to be here. I have no doubt about that.

I think that's good pushback. Chris, we should be careful to say that we boiled down wearables for the purpose of this short discussion to recording audio. When of course wearables have lots of other modalities and things that they do. But to pull on that thread for a second, there's this guy, Ivan Ventrov, who wrote an essay just a couple weeks ago. Chris, if you haven't read it, you should like I shared it in the Slack at Spark yesterday. It's called Shallow feedback. Hollows you out. And it is ostensibly about the feedback loop that you just talked about, but applied to kind of writing generally. The why does somebody who is a really great and interesting thinker, why does it feel like in this world now they pop out into the world, they have a brilliant insight and then if you just watch them. And his phrasing basically is like thinkers co evolve with their audiences. And so because they are now in this very tight feedback loop with their audiences, they sensibly become crazy people over the course of the next decade that like their audience just gives shallow feedback because the average of a large audience isn't thinking that deeply about the thing. And then because they're co evolving with their audience, that original thinker becomes shallow over time instead of becoming deeper over time. And I think that I want something to record everything that I say. I don't know that I want access to the transcript or the audio of all of that thing. I want something to record everything that I say so that an LLM can get smarter about me so that I can get smarter about me. I want it to be my augmented memory that's very different from. I want it to be used in a social context. Like, I think we should be very careful about the things that we introduce to others in a social context. And so I agree. We are incredibly social creatures, man. There's no way we just. If the recorder is on all the time that we just act exactly the same way.

And I think what's. What's tricky there. Just imagine there's a device and it's very clear that the audio recording transcript is not accessible. But there's all this, like, upside value. Right. And I think everyone could feel good about that. There'll be other devices that look similar that don't do that. You know what I mean? And I think that's where the social dynamic is like, oh, just like the compressed version of the knowledge of the content or queryable or what have you.

Like, what's this?

And the social contract around that is what gets.

I think the social contract's important. I think. Is this thing going to be used or can it be used in what context is really important? Like, I'm the one who had. Chris, I had a visceral reaction. I emailed you after trying the beta version of the mobile app for Granola that, like, just watching the little transcript thing bounce up and down and thinking about it, recording words like, I don't like it. It's like, don't do that. Just. Just let me open it up and start my meeting.

Funny story about the Granola mobile app. It's not public. 1. We're working on one. The engineer who's working on. His name's Jonathan. He got engaged over the holidays and he turned the app on on his phone and in his pocket while he proposed. And the notes are great. Like, they're really funny, actually. Like, I'm gonna. I think I'm gonna ask him if we can tweet it. It's actually a really cool record to have of that moment in, like a weird way. Anyway. I don't. That feels like neither here nor there, but there is like kind of going back to that conversation where there's something like that. There's something kind of magical about being able to go back to certain moments. It's not here nor there.

That's totally apropos to the previous comment. Right. That's a magical moment captured for them now that wasn't previously done.

Yeah. I wonder if there's a secondary record button. There's the, like, it's always thinking and it's always gaining context. And then maybe what you really need is another button which is actually a record button, which is like, okay, this time, this moment, sactivo. I actually want the audio and the transcript of this part.

I actually agree on that. I actually think we are missing a term or a verb for it.

I can get my head around that.

Yeah, for me it's very related to the. If an LLM reads a document, is that a copy of a document or is it just learning from the document?

With all this, I just think there are new norms that need to be established and I think we're still things like I'm taking form, needs to take form a bit more and then it needs to be labeled and then there needs to be norms that evolve around those labels. And right now it's just like the semorphism. It'll be interesting though. It'll definitely be interesting. I do think until we have real utility that comes out of these, I think it'll be moot because no one will care the moment they become really useful. I think that's when it gets interesting. That's like, then we're off to the races.

So let's use that as a kind of last standing off point because I know we're over time and everything. Like we've talked about what we feel is good and magical about granola that it like augments a human behavior. We talked about the fact that that behavior being frequent matters a lot. And it was matters a lot. It's you were thinking through this process. Is there something else is for you Frasier too as well? Is there something else in your guys lives that you wish was granola eyes? And is there something else, A pattern of behavior that you guys do in the rest of your lives on a regular basis that you just wish you had augmented? You just wish you had, you know, not a chatbot copilot, but somebody who kept you in flow. Anything for you too.

Well, what came to my mind, and I actually don't know if it's a good example, but I wish there's something that would be better is my calendar and scheduling. And the reason I say that is because on one hand you could imagine a really smart agent doing a lot for you, right? Like bringing best practices in and moving stuff like defragging or whatever people who are world class at this do. And you know, looking down the line and realizing, hey, there's like a you're not going to have enough time a couple weeks from now, so whatever you're reaching stuff. But yeah, conversely it'd be incredibly frustrating if you couldn't go in there and like change every little detail about any meeting yourself. And you need to have that control. So I think there's this a little bit like with granola, you're like, you have to give the ability to lean in as much or lean back as much as you want. I think you'd need that same ability with a calendar app. I think there might be something there.

I'll give mine and it might be related to granola, it might not. It's going to sound really basic because it's another one of these. IRC becomes discord and it's a forever thing. I think think project management like the asanas of the world. There's always some version of I'm trying to break down tasks. I think it's different than personal to do's in a work context. Those things tend to have dependencies. I tend to not be able to think around every corner. It's always a question of wording. You know, I used to do a thing that I didn't do anymore. But right after we would invest for the company, I'd sit down with them and we'd go through their annual goals. And I do a lot of rewriting of the language with the founders to make it more explicit. You know, there's, there's like, there's like 20 rules, 30 rules of best practices for doing good structured project management inside of an org. Any group of people trying to get anything done. And I think it's a world where I don't think you need me to type in what the project title is. And then you filled out a thousand little bullet points with a Gantt chart. It's more like let me organically make something. I can't even imagine what the UI would be right now. But like, like let me organically make something and then start to augment that behavior, build out that behavior, Help me think around dependencies and corners as I'm working on it while keeping me in flow. That's a product that should, that should exist.

That would be great. Yeah.

Yeah, I agree. Frazier, you got anything?

Earlier you said that we don't predict the future, we listen.

And then this is a case where I'm going to listen.

Nothing's coming to mind.

That's great.

Well, if anything comes to mind later, you can always tweet it out or email me.

I'm around. Awesome.

Chris, thanks so much for joining us today.

Thank you so much.

Yeah, we'll listen back and think about how stupid all the stuff you just said was. But thank you so much. This is fun.

Always done with humility. All of this. Always done with humility.